Corruption Rarely Begins As Corruption And Other Lessons

I have a friend who just completed his 24 months as a resident of TROSA in Durham, a best practice treatment center for substance abuse.

Now he is a post grad for a month or two before he walks the stage in their next quarterly graduation ceremony.  As is true for many graduates, the program has had a profound impact on the life of this individual.

I’ve known about TROSA and been friends with its founder from its inception, but I’ve observed even more about why the program has been so successful as I have participated in some events over the past two years.

It takes two years, not just to kick bad habits, but to drill down to the triggers behind them, and most of all, to inculcate values and coping mechanisms including not just work ethic but how to work with others.

These include techniques for conflict resolution and emotional control.  One that is particularly important in the program is zero tolerance for failing to disclose something that is awry, even if you weren’t involved, even if was for a good reason.

TROSA understands that corruption rarely begins as corruption.

It may even be a means to a good end as United Airlines executives recently learned the hard way.

As Dr. Dan Ariely who also calls Durham home, along with his colleagues including Harvard’s Dr. Francesca Gino have shown, “simply seeing another person cheat can lead us to cheat, even if we care about being honest.”

TROSA understands that even omission of acknowledgment is contagious and leads to a slippery slope.

The organization is famous for its entrepreneurial approach.  It’s is too bad one of them isn’t offering workforce and leadership training to businesses and agencies on accountability and the importance of speaking up.

But as Dr. Gino notes in a Harvard Business Review post this week, “Behavior can be contagious even when it’s simply described in a story.”

Stories of people, especially low-level employees, who uphold organizational values is a particularly effective means of “onboarding” new hires especially when it comes to orientations regarding ethics.

In my former life, I saw otherwise good people in each of the communities I represented who always seemed to be dogged by stories of corruption.

What they had in common was the way they made decisions, usually based on “who was asking” for something rather than a strategy of fairness and consistency.

I never felt this shadow on their reputation was deserved but the behaviors that brought it about often made it difficult to work with them as strategic partners because they were always asking me to subtly cross the line.

They never saw themselves that way.

But really, none of us do.

As Dr. Gino wrote in here excellent book entitled, Sidetracked: Why Our Decisions Get Derailed, we all have “a rose-colored view of who we are and what we do, and we aim to behave in ways that are consistent with our self-image as capable, competent, helpful, and honest individuals.”

The book deals with forces from within, forces from our relationships and forces from the outside, “factors that characterize the context in which we operate and make decisions.

It’s a good book, as is Ariely’s entitled, The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty.

I always found myself considered a pariah by the “who’s asking” types who would in each of the communities I represented, ultimately make it their objective to recruit as many others around me to their way of thinking, hoping that the isolation would make me give in, or at the very least get me fired.

While holding firm to strategic decision-making about what was best for these communities, I always made doubly certain that our organization gave them every service we were capable of giving while remaining authentic.

But I also owe becoming a better and better leader over the years to these people.  Just because they were wrong doesn’t make them stupid or wrong about everything.

I became the CEO of a destination marketing organization at a very young age, twenty-six, so until the day I retired I viewed myself as a work in progress.

Trying to be rigidly authentic or true to yourself can, if you are not careful, also keep you from evolving.

This all made more sense to me looking back as I read an article a few months ago by Dr. Herminia Ibarra, formerly of Harvard, now professor of organizational behavior at Instead, The Business School for the World, entitled The Authenticity Paradox.

The reputation I earned over four decades was all about change.  I may have led three DMOs but they literally evolved weekly - if not daily - so in essence I led about 1,700 different organizations.

My personal “authenticity paradox” was learning that building consensus for ideas and values among stakeholders in a community can feel, well, more than a bit slimy and political but it can still be data-driven and strategic.

During my career I was intrigued when I was frequently credited with grit, resilience and perseverance so when I come across research into those traits, I try to read carefully.

Based on recent research at The Ohio State University, grit and perseverance in the face of repeated obstacles and even failure arise when an individual is able to generalize from successful past success while still learning from failures.

People who can learn to do this stand out from those who have the appearance of grit but are betrayed by perpetually needing to self aggrandize, making them particularly vulnerable to “who’s asking” decision makers.

The latter may have learned grit but their perseverance masks an otherwise negative self-image, thus the self aggrandizement.

Researchers have found that losing is actually good for us.  People who self aggrandize are put off or threatened by participating in “post mortems” after a projects, something which I adapted from EST training or a Ken Blanchard seminar in the early 1980s.

During post mortems, some people literally can’t or won’t shift gears from “what worked” to “what didn’t work,” no matter how safe and blameless you make them.

Often this is because they have issues with accountability or accepting responsibility but it can also be because they have never learned the values of introspection and curiosity which research by the authors of The Innovator’s DNA found are indicative of a rare blend of humility and confidence.

Possibly this is due to the stories they were told as children, which in the words of Seth Godin, “matter far more than we imagine.”

Values imprint by observation or patterning from birth to age 7, then from modeling or identification until age 13, including making our own value decisions, then from socialization with peers until we’re age 20.

People who can’t admit, let alone learn from failure or even admit “what didn’t work” in an otherwise successful transaction were probably told stories along the way that led them to believe that success came from fixed states, making them vulnerable to “who’s asking.”

Learning from failure and even success, on the other hand, are investments in continuing and never ending improvement rather than chalking it up to fixed states.

The difference is between looking good and actually being good, the essence of authenticity.

These are things TROSA understands – teaches and applies – so beautifully.

New values can be learned after the age of 20 but it is very hard and usually occurs with a significant emotional crisis such as facing up to addiction.

“Post Mortems” Are Essential to Optimizing Productivity

Clearly the source of some things you pick up so naturally early in your career gets lost over time.

Somewhere between graduating from college and having a hand in community marketing startups in Spokane in the 1970s and Anchorage in the 1980s, I adopted the practice of always conducting group “post mortems” after projects were completed.

By the time of my last DMO startup for Durham, North Carolina, the practice of “post mortems” was a central feature.

This is where co-workers gather after a project (on average 50% of any job is project-related – 100% in DMOs) to reflect on what worked and what didn’t work as well as lessons-learned.

To the consternation of a few co-workers who always resisted this practice, usually because they couldn’t seem to help but take everything personally, reflection such as this is the subject of some new research studies.

Repeatedly required during these sessions was “this isn’t about who, but what!”

I suspect I adopted “post mortems” from something I read in the 1970s by or about EST founder Werner Erhard while powering through the briefcase of “airplane reading” I always had handy.

Erhard was a very serial social entrepreneur and deep thinker about the processes of management and productivity. With no Internet in those days, I would read voraciously and then tear some articles out for further study when I could give it my full attention.

Anchorage back then was still attached at the hip with Seattle, or so Seattle seemed to think it its entitled manner.  It was a three hour flight there, four hours to San Francisco, 7+ hours to New York or Tokyo and 9+ hours to London, all of which I was required to travel to in those days on business, often on short turn arounds.

Even a simple round trip flight just to the state capital in Juneau took nearly three hours.

I got through a ton of reading either attending coop marketing planning meetings for the state or opening up new inbound markets specific to Anchorage.

I also burned out on business travel during my near-decade there but have to admit it also provided time for much needed reflection.

Durham, where I spent the remainder of my career is the center of a four-county metro designation that includes Chapel Hill.  Each community is home base to a noted business school.

I won’t make the mistake a DMO exec made several weekends ago when referring to her community as overflow for Duke without bothering to mention Duke is not in Chapel Hill or identifying other hotels in her comments were also actually in Durham.

She obviously forgot that the DMO’s in this part of North Carolina have a written agreement to ethically restrict comments to their specific destination and refer media to others for information in those communities.

I am sure there will be a conference-call “post mortem” to reconnect the dots.  Some DMOs, seemingly bored with destination marketing, always seem prone to mind the business of others places and in doing so, undermine their own.

Often they use the term “regional” as cover, which is pretentious and probably means they are simply in the wrong business.

Chapel Hill is home to the main campus of the University of North Carolina, one of 16 in that system overall.

Dr. Bradley Staats who teaches in the Kenan-Flagler Business School there and lives in nearby Carrboro is the co-author of a working paper detailing a series of studies reviewed recently by Carmen Nobel on Harvard Business School’s “Working Knowledge” forum.

The studies confirm the importance of individual and group reflection to learning.  Most research focuses on “doing” but this study confirms that reflection on work or “unpacking” creates incredible value-added.

We learn not just by doing but through reflection.  Because there is a tendency in any fast paced organization to move to quickly to the next thing, setting aside time for what I learned to call “post mortems” to glean lessons learned is crucial.

I certainly found it to be an essential ingredient to our ability to leapfrog much more established organizations,  I also found failing to do so seem to condemn other organizations to stubborn feedback loops that inhibited growth.

Individual and group reflection on a project is also how we learn to adapt our behavior and overcome the stubbornness and ego-centrism that holds so many back in the workplace or in relationships with peers.

“Go to your room” as my parents often required when I was growing up was just the beginning of self-reflection.  Once everyone had cooled down, the indispensible ingredient to learning was “unpacking” the issue or issues involved with the parent or parents involved.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t always happen and lessons-learned get truncated.  Home is where we should first learn that “it isn’t about who, but what!” These are the building blocks of conflict resolution.

Without the second part, learning, and therefore performance, isn’t optimized regardless of what stage of life your are in, especially in the workplace.

Organizational Introspection Is Crucial To Growth And Innovation!

Organizations that poach employees from another, hoping to emulate and embed its cultural secrets are often only able to get a data-dump of references and programs. It soon becomes apparent that they couldn’t really poach or replicate the innovative spirit that created them for our organization.

One critical element of a culture of “continuing and never-ending improvement” is what we always called a “post mortem” in two of the three community/destination marketing organizations for whom I was an executive during my now concluded four-decade-long career in that field.

The “post mortems” I’m referring to involve a group-unwrapping of “what worked”, “what didn’t work” and “lessons learned” during a project or initiative. However, “post mortems” aren’t easy.

Like some people I’ve met, many organizations aren’t at all introspective. They may be similar to the 70% of Americans who are “dysfunctional when it comes to issues such as blame or credit” as described by the authors of Managing Yourself: Can You Handle Failure published month before last in Harvard Business Review.

By using the word dysfunctional, the authors explain why such a significant portion of the workforce - including management who carry old “tapes” from their upbringing – struggles with “post mortems” such as we used to hold, because they are quick to blame themselves or quick to blame others but deny responsibility or blame others unfairly and harshly. I’ll add to their list those who always interpret a question as a criticism.

Based on my personal experience over several decades, many people don’t readily grasp that “post mortems” are never about “who.” These sessions are about unwrapping and understanding the “what, how, when and why” so that successes can populate future efforts going forward and missteps of the past are far less likely to be repeated.

One of the co-authors of that article, Ben Dattner, is also the co-author of a useful book published the month before Managing Yourself appeared entitled The Blame Game – How The Hidden Rules of Credit and Blame Determine Our Success or Failure. I didn’t realize I had read a relatively new book at the time until I caught a comment during errands on a radio interview last weekend.

Part of the reason so many people have trouble distancing themselves from an evaluation such as a post mortem can unfortunately be traced to various types of coercive parenting as summarized in a recent blog about an article by M. Sue Bergin. Of course, it also doesn’t help when our political discourse seems so often grid-locked around issues of blame.

But making it even more difficult in today’s workplace are the unrealistic expectations for praise that begin now with pre-school graduation ceremonies, making it even more about “who” and not “what.”

Many people in the workplace and management, especially those with praise-addicted and fragile self-esteem, would do well to read a new book published a month ago by Tim Harford entitled Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure and reviewed so well in a blog post last week by David Brooks, also author of The Social Animal.

The column reminded me of a now-retired Dr. James Reason’s Human Error, a book I read when it was first published not long after I moved to Durham two decades ago. While Reason dealt mostly with life and death issues like airline safety or medical mishaps, the organization I led here, in a former life, was fortunate to adapt and embed his techniques and findings to improve systems and processes involved in destination marketing.

More than 50% of any type of work is actually project management and that involves systems and processes, work-structure-breakdowns and other things that improve consistency and enhance productivity but also help limit errors which Reason always broke down into slip-ups, violations of protocol or things that were done by the book but had unintentional consequences.

“Post mortems” are also important because studies have shown that it is much easier for the people involved with a project or initiative to get to the bottom of how to improve them; but they are also in the best position to root out anything that may preclude things from being fair to all concerned or have the potential for unethical behavior.

Organizations that don’t religiously conduct spirited “post mortems” immediately after the conclusion of projects and initiatives or even just mistakes are missing out on crucial information that can be used to improve performance and stimulate innovation.

But the first step in any “post mortem” is to always remind everyone involved that the introspection is never about “who” but only about “what, how and why.”

Who knows, the same advice may help more people open up to personal introspection as well.